From the outside, 1st Sgt. David H. McNerney seems like any other aging warrior; his wars have become echoes, and he'd rather take his dog for a ride in his pickup than revisit them.

Only his soldiers are able to coax memories out of him, and through their eyes the story of the Crosby man's valor has become the subject of a documentary premiering today in Washington, D.C., at the GI Film Festival.

The 78-year-old, who defied death decades ago while saving lives on a Vietnam battlefield, will be there for the festivities and to say a final goodbye to the soldiers he still refers to as his “boys.”

Lung cancer, McNerney's doctors have told him, will soon claim his life.

“Everybody has to pass,” said McNerney, who has no children of his own. “It's my turn.”

For 50 men, it will be a time to say “thank you” and to honor a man they have come to revere.

“If it wasn't for him there'd be a whole lot more of us still over there,” said retired Sgt. Leonard W. McElroy, from his home in Bonner Springs, Kan.

McElroy remembers the intense fighting during a grueling March 1967 ambush by a North Vietnamese battalion near Polei Doc, in which McNerney took command of the unit after his superiors were killed, saving the unit against incredible odds and earning him the military's highest honor.

Their damaged radios cut the unit off from aid and they were surrounded by combatants, bullets and grenades. But McNerney was calm, perhaps trying to set the example for his younger troops as he soldiered through the chaos, his troops recall.

“He was invincible. He just said, ‘I'm going over to the front,' and he walked over,” McElroy said. “I asked him later if he was afraid, and he said, ‘No, I didn't think anything was going to happen to me.'”

But something did happen when a grenade exploded near him and knocked him off his feet, breaking a couple of his ribs. McNerney refused to be evacuated, according to his Medal of Honor citation, and he continued guiding his boys.

The documentary, Honor in the Valley of Tears, recalls the event and the lives of the men affected.

“They have such a profound respect and love for him,” said New York City filmmaker John Ponsoll, whose father served under McNerney. “My dad lights up like a Christmas tree when he gets to talk of one of his war buddies.”

Band of brothers

Wanting to learn more about his father's time in Vietnam, Ponsoll and filmmaker Eric Dow crisscrossed the country interviewing veterans. The two quickly dis covered not many enjoyed discussing their own experiences, instead always circling back to McNerney, who was their trainer at Fort Lewis, Wash., and then signed on to lead them in the field.

“I kind of felt they needed all the help they could get, and they were my boys,” McNerney said.

Now men with families of their own, many still look to McNerney, about 15 years their senior, as a father figure.

“My dad died before I went into the Army. He was the closest thing I had, and I'm going to miss him,” McElroy said. “Our group has a bond you can't believe. We're as close as a family of brothers.”

The soldiers describe McNerney as a stern, serious and frightful man with piercing blue eyes that could quiet a room with a squint and rarely smiled and never cracked a joke. Most avoided eye contact at all costs.

“In the beginning you'd think that everyone hated him,” McElroy said. “But by the end we all loved him.”

It is a common sentiment among the men of A-Company 1/8. “I was scared to death of him. He was mean and lean,” said Dave Lockwood, who was drafted as a rifleman and became a team leader. “He was a hell of a man. … It was his way of making men out of a bunch of boys.”

From a military family

Years of service had honed McNerney's skills. With his father serving in WWI and a brother and sister in WWII, the military was in his blood. He enlisted upon graduating from Houston's St. Thomas High School in 1949.

After two tours with the Navy in Korea, McNerney tried civilian life with a short stint studying at the University of Houston, but it proved disagreeable.

“I didn't like school much,” said McNerney, who signed up with the Army when he spotted a recruitment poster on campus. “That's what I was, a soldier.”

He retired from the Army in 1969 and worked for the U.S. Customs Office at the Port of Houston until retirement in 1995. His wife died in 2003.

Since then, he's been keeping busy with his stamp collection and invited appearances at President Barack Obama's inauguration, local JROTC troop functions, Veterans Affairs events and the Crosby branch of the American Legion, which has had talks about naming the branch in his honor.

Content about the future

Lockwood isn't sure how he'll say goodbye before he heads back home to Florence, Ore. He said McNerney “was one of them guys that you thought would live forever.”

Doctors offered McNerney chemotherapy radiation as the sole option to likely keep him alive beyond September, but he refused.

“They said I could extend my life by a few months, but that's not much,” McNerney said. “We'll see what happens. Maybe it won't grow as fast as doctors think.”

He is content with dying on his terms but wonders how it will affect his boys.

“The strange thing is that he's clearly the kind of guy that's immortal,” James Allen recalled from his home in Aurora, Colo. “We could call him anytime and always thought that he'd be there forever, but it doesn't work like that.”

Allen was a medic attached to McNerney's unit and hadn't planned on attending the reunion until he heard of the cancer. “When I heard that, it was a no-brainer,” Allen said.

On Friday, the men will fulfill the only request McNerney made when asked what he'd like to do during his last reunion: They will visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall and lay a wreath at panel 16-E, where the majority of the 33 soldiers lost from his unit have their names engraved.

The veterans will be honoring the memory of their fallen brothers, but it won't be lost on anyone that they're about to lose their leader.